US Scientists Probe Australian Desert Mystery
by Dan Brekke

3:04pm 28.May.97.PDT -- A team of US scientists, dispatched to Australia to try to find the source of a ground-shaking light that lit the outback heavens four years ago, reported their remarkable findings Wednesday.

The light most likely did not come, as some had feared, from a nuclear weapon cooked up by a Japanese cult with a fixation on weapons of mass destruction.

Concerns that the event was connected to the Aum Shinrikyo group, which owned property in the region and was reportedly trying to enrich uranium there, led officials in Australia and the United States to launch a long-term scientific inquiry. The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations asked seismologists affiliated with the National Science Foundation to look at what had happened in the outback.

The inquiry has come back with an answer that would be rejected by X-Files scriptwriters. The thing did come from space. But it was a big, dumb thing, made mostly of iron, that fell hard but apparently harmlessly to the ground. Enough energy was expended when the thing fell to register strongly on seismographs in the region.

The best explanation for the thing that desert gold miners and truck drivers saw cross the sky and vanish in a flash the night of 28 May 1993 was likely a 2- or 3-meter-diameter meteorite, a team of seismologists assembled by New York's Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology told the American Geophysical Union in a report on the event.

"If the eyewitness accounts are credible, the seismic signal was most likely created by the impact of an iron meteorite," said seismologist Gregory van der Vink in a statement. "Such a meteorite could survive passage through the atmosphere, and impact earth with sufficient energy to create the seismic signal picked up by one of our stations in the Global Seismographic Network."

Not that the case is closed. The scientists noted that a meteorite of the size they guess was involved in the 1993 incident should have left a crater nearly 100 meters across. No crater has been found, and a hunt through the 485 square miles identified as the impact area is planned.

Scientists examining the event are Christal B. Hennet and Gregory E. van der Vink of Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology in New York; Danny Harvey of the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Christopher Chyba of the University of Arizona. Harvey is a research associate at the Joint Seismic Program Center in the UC-Boulder physics department.